Free Republic

Yesterday, by accident, at night, I read about the barbaric things done to women in Israel by the Hamass terrorist attack on 10/7. I enjoin you not to follow that link, if you don’t want my nightmares last night. And I woke up and was thinking… well, about a lot of things. The only thing unusual about the way Hamass treated those women (and children) is that they killed most of them. Unusual, I mean from an historical perspective. I was thinking of the rape of the Sabines, upon which the founding of Rome rested. Bunch of young braves, (given...

Through a mutual friend, I got something ESR said, and it struck me as profound:“Voltaire can be inverted. If you’re willing to commit atrocities, this is a sign that you believe absurdities.” –Eric S. RaymondThe context was a discussion of AI and AI advancements but that is not important right now.The important thing is the actual meaning of those words.We’re surrounded by not particularly bright or educated (though a lot of them are very credentialed and confuse that for intelligence), but very passionate people causally saying things like We need to reduce Earth population by several billion, or We must...

[...] And I hope to G-d someone with access to him reads this and tells him it’s time. Take the family NOW and go to an undisclosed location. As much as it hurts me to say this, because I want him to continue harassing the left, he has to realize this is no longer the sweet land of liberty. This is now a tyrannical third world shithole. Or will be within months from the way our occupiers are behaving. They will find a way to kill him and his whole family, or kill him and turn his family against him....

I've been listening to crazy people saying things like, "someone isn't entitled to the presumption of innocence," or an accusation that is not only unproven but unprovable is "corroborated" in growing alarm. What goes through my mind is that this is the way you un-make civilization. Part of the problem is that our civilization – arguably, at least in terms of keeping the most people alive and in relative comfort – is not normal in the history of the world. This strange idea that each individual has rights, that the rights are inherent to them, that they deserve to be...